ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the waning influence of structuralist and dependency analyses and the subsequent rise and fall of neo-monetarism. Neo-monetarism became the fashion from the mid-1970s onwards but ran into trouble in the early 1980s. Latin America has been going through a profound economic crisis since the 1982-3 world recession from which it has yet to recover. Neo-monetarist policies are partly blamed for this economic collapse, which in many Latin American countries is more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is possible that the loss of credibility of neo-monetarism will lead to a renewal of interest in structuralist and dependencia ideas. At present old debates are resurfacing under new guises, such as those on industrialization, the debt, inflation, and state intervention. Thus, the various contending theoretical paradigms have had their ups and downs, leaving a vacuum which still waits to be filled. The question I want to pursue here concerns the extent to which structuralism and dependency analysis can provide a framework for the study of Latin America’s present-day predicament, and more generally provide a way out of Latin America’s development crisis as well as of the crisis of development theory identified in Chapter 1.
